| 释义 |
‖ wen-yen|wən jɛn|
Also wenyan, wenyen, and with capital initial.
[Chinese wényán, f. wén writing + yán speech, words.]
The traditional literary language or style of China, superseded in the twentieth century by pai-hua.
1936N. Wales in E. Snow Living China 336 Until 1917 there existed in..stalemate three fairly distinct strata of literature: (1) the ancient cult of the literati in the dead wen-yen classical written language,..(2) the healthy parvenu pai-hua, ‘plain speech’, literature of the people in the spoken language, and..(3) the story-tellers' literature in the provincial dialects. 1964Anthropol. Linguistics Mar. 31 Many words which require two characters in Han Chinese can be written with one character in Wenyen. 1968[see pai-hua]. 1969Language XLV. 690 One is the Classical Chinese, wényán, which has been used from antiquity up to recent years. 1980Times Lit. Suppl. 27 June 725/1 He has been engaged..in an immense study of the ancient Chinese classics written in the elegant but archaic wenyen Chinese favoured by old-fashioned scholars—a language almost as remote from present-day speech as Latin from the modern European vernaculars. |